Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(92)
The agony of her children’s deaths still sounded in an undiminished cacophony—yes, she was perfectly aware of it—but the anguish was no longer particular to her. It simply was: one could hear it clearly, and listen to it calmly, picking out its individual timbres and notes, distinguishing its great themes and minor phrases. She grieved for every quiet sigh Beryl Waldorf had made. Her heart broke for each timid inflection in Thomas Essom’s voice. She heard every harmonic in the screech of the chalk on the blackboard when she had written Tom’s surname after her own. Of course: nobody ever really died. Life lingered. Every breath would persist forever, written in the clay of the city. And given that this was so perfectly obvious, it suddenly seemed imponderable that the enemy would make the effort to pack high explosive into a metal casing, fight it through the defending fire, and drop it from twenty thousand feet over a city of immortals.
Hilda was watching with her eyebrows raised in a question, and Mary realized that this had been the case for some time, and possibly forever. “Better?” said Hilda again, or perhaps it was still the first time she had asked: the word dissolved into the groundwater of the city, the word without end.
She strained to place her mouth into air. “Yes, thank you. Much.”
Hilda seemed ready to cry.
Mary said, “I am sorry I wasn’t kinder to you.”
“Oh, don’t be sorry, it’s . . .” Hilda looked up at blackness. “It’s . . .”
Mary watched the incomplete phrase float up into the night and come to rest there, glittering in bright points at the farthest extremity of the sky. This was how the stars had been made, after all: each the end of an unfinished thought, each an answer that one had known all along. She realized, of course, that this was not the sky and the stars—only the torches of the rescuers and the black roof of the basement—but she also understood that it was the same thing.
And now she realized—as the black water rose above her nose and eyes, as the light of the stars became blurred through the water—that this breath inside her was her last. She smiled, exhaled, and sank.
Hilda squeezed her hands. The two of them had always known each other, of course. They were one person—she, and Hilda, and Alistair, and Tom. They had gone too far into the unendurable dark and now they glittered there, too far apart to be a comfort to one another anymore, but not so scattered that a godlike eye could never make of them a constellation.
The night lasted a moment, then forever.
In the dark, silhouetted against the stars of the rescuers’ torches, she watched Hilda’s face come down through the water toward her. Hilda’s black hair floated in strands against the light. Now she will have to have her hair reset, thought Mary. Why is she sinking down with me?
And then Hilda’s lips pressed against hers, and Hilda’s fingers pinched her nostrils closed, and Mary felt Hilda’s breath, sharp with tobacco and unutterably perfect, flooding into her. The breath hung suspended inside her, glowing and lovely. Mary held the breath until the life was gone from it, then sent it up to the surface. Against the torchlight she watched the silver bubbles rise. After a moment, Hilda’s mouth came down and breathed into her again.
Again and again Hilda breathed, and Mary learned the habit of breathing only when Hilda’s lips pressed against hers. How long it went on, and how silently. When finally the water level fell, and words came back into the world, and she heard Hilda saying she must breathe on her own now, Mary had become so dependent on Hilda’s lips that at first she did not dare to breathe without them. She clung to Hilda, and pressed her face to hers, and it took a long time of Hilda gently pushing her away before she understood that her mouth was above water again.
The level fell. The rescuers had managed to run the intake pipes from the fire engines down into the basement, and soon it was pumped dry. They brought a hydraulic jack and lifted the beam that had pinned her. They laid her on a stretcher, wrapped her in blankets and took her to the surface. Hilda took a grease pen and painted a letter M on her forehead.
People were saying how much blood she had lost. Through the slow warp of the morphine Mary tried to listen, although it was becoming harder to make out words. It seemed that the beam, pinning her left leg, had cut into something that bled. Everyone moved faster now, and she watched them all rush around. How funny they were. It was because they did not understand that the air was all one needed. Now this perfect breath; now this one; now this. Hilda tightened a tourniquet around her thigh. How silly she was. They wrapped her in more blankets, and then Clive and Huw lifted her stretcher onto the rack on the roof of the Hillman. Somebody drove, impossibly fast. The Hillman screeched and slewed. Mary thought, I hope they have remembered to strap the world on to me.
Here was the indigo sky, noisy with stars. Mary stared up at them, all the unslaked billions. How gamely they faded. Without fuss, and faster now, the stars were losing their brightness. And as the stars dimmed, by soft degrees and quietly, the stars and the night became one. It was softer than one imagined, at the end. The final thing was the sound—lovely, in its way—of the last, lost bombers of the enemy droning home through the air that had been there all along. The air, then, quietening now—which would be there after they were gone. The ageless air, barely perturbed by their slipstream.
April, 1941
A SIROCCO BLEW DUST in from Africa. The sun, even at noon, cast red light over the island. The wind blew for six days, so dry that exposed skin cracked like fired earth, so hard that the emaciated children could not walk against it and instead careened from alley to alcove in the ruins. The windblown grit scourged their legs until they bled.